Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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easy for MJSers to live with differences among themselves on this issue. Foremost is the campaign’s agreement to welcome and encourage all efforts to end MTR, and to welcome in everyone who wants to help, as long as all participants eschew both violence and property damage. Also helpful are a cluster of attitudes among the self-identified radicals in MJS, many of whom call themselves anarchists as well as Earth Firsters. Unlike libertarians, who envision a world of cussed individualists, every one for oneself, anarchists tend to favor self-organizing communities of cussed individualists. Solidarity and mutual aid matter—out of them, community is built. Self-defense matters, too, which EF!-affiliated anarchists involved with MJS construe as including defense of one’s ecological life-support system. Thus, for this movement’s anarchists, working together with non-anarchist coalfield activists defending themselves, their communities, and the land from MTR is a good ideological fit. It’s helpful, also, that some of those coalfield activists see MTR as part of broader, systemic problems in America—helpful, but not necessary. There’s no requirement for ideological unity in this campaign.
There’s also no requirement for philosophical unity about nonviolence. MJS requires its participants to adopt nonviolence and avoidance of property damage as a tactic for this campaign, not as a way of life. Nonviolence and avoidance of property damage have often, perhaps more often than not, been linked in campaigns that adopt civil disobedience, for both practical and philosophical reasons. However, Earth Firsters have long been of several minds about this. EF! has consistently (or as consistently as such a loosely organized movement can manage) eschewed violence and taken care to avoid risks of physical harm to anyone in its actions. Although most individuals and campaigns have usually eschewed property damage as well, some have chosen to damage or destroy machinery that is used to harm living ecosystems. EFers have also differed about what exactly constitutes property destruction. (Does making a mess count? Pulling up survey stakes? Spiking trees?) In addition, most of the people involved in MJS (EFers as well as others) personally believe that they have a right to use violence in self-defense: If someone attacks them, they have a right to fight back. Others in the campaign, though, are personally committed to avoiding violence in all situations. MJS’s nonviolent, no-property-damage position has been adopted both to enable such diverse people to work together and because there’s general agreement that, as a practical matter, it’s what’s tactically best for this campaign.
MJSers encompass a wide range of differences about religion as well. Some are fiercely secular, actively hostile to organized religion. Others perceive themselves as spiritually engaged, but not necessarily in a church-going way. The movement also includes Christians whose anti-MTR activism is motivated by their religion. Most MJSers who have any sense of spirituality at all perceive it as connected with or activated by contact with nature. Most are at least somewhat familiar and comfortable with the precepts of Deep Ecology. A few of MJS’s religious Deep Ecology believers see themselves as worshipping Gaia, or pursuing forms of paganism; most incorporate Deep Ecology into Christian or other religious beliefs and practices. By and large, MJS does pretty well with avoiding religious disagreements. The fact that religious MJSers typically have a sense that God speaks many languages, and that there are many paths to God, defuses much of the hostility to religion that “godless” MJS activists might ordinarily feel or express. It also means that differences about religion tend to be perceived as lifestyle differences, rather than heresy.
However, lifestyle differences turn out to be the source of some of the most dysfunctional divisions within MJS. Appalachians living in the coalfields have a range of rural lifestyles that have little in common with the urban-punk sensibility of many other MJSers. In addition, MJS’s coalfield-based activists are mostly middle-aged; MJSers based outside the coalfields are mostly younger. Lifestyle differences among MJSers don’t line up neatly along local/outsider or older/younger lines. Across those lines are endless permutations and combinations of hippie, hillbilly hippie, crusty punk, vegan, omnivore, “ninja,” “pirate,” and other preferences in clothing, food, music, and other matters. Still, for a host of reasons having to do with differences in life experience, coalfield locals and “outsider” activists often experience moments of mutual incomprehension, opportunities for giving or taking offense without real intention. With MJS’s recruiting efforts focused primarily on college-aged urban activists, such moments look likely to multiply in the months ahead.
Tension across these various differences is inevitable. MJS’s hope is that focusing on a clear common goal—ending MTR, combined with persistent efforts at mutual respect, and at finding strength rather than weakness in the sum of everyone’s differences, will be enough to make those tensions manageable.
MJS activists are busy on many fronts this February and March. A donation wish list for MJS is now circulating. An activist in southwestern Virginia is working up a list of threatened and endangered fish and mollusks in the area, for use in challenging MTR there. Judy Bonds, Dave Cooper, and others are working on outreach to religious groups, from nuns in Ohio to Baptists in West Virginia, connecting support in the fight against MTR with religious responsibility to care for God’s creation. OVEC and CRMW, with outside funding promised, have begun seeking “coalfield organizers” to hire for the summer. Folks in Tennessee are researching coal companies and permits there, mobilizing activists to attend or submit comments to hearings on mine permits for sites north of Knoxville up near the Kentucky border. They’re also moving toward appealing a court ruling against a challenge to the federal Office of Surface Mining’s failure to study and consider environmental impacts before permitting the MTR site at Zeb Mountain, recently bought by National Coal Corporation (NCC). (Zeb and NCC are prime targets for MJS action in Tennessee.)
In early March, Chris Irwin bounces his truck back into the woods to photograph a twenty-five-acre landslide a few ridges southwest of Zeb Mountain, on a former strip mine officially deemed “reclaimed” in accordance with government regulations. “It was as if the ‘reclamation’ was a cancer that had finally burst from the skin of the earth,” Chris reports. “What caused [the] megaslide is evident—you can hear it, water. At least four different sources of water were cutting through the shale and coal-blended soil. An unstable substrate combined with water and really steep slopes creates landslides. Ridgetops may be cheap for coal companies to blast—it’s impossible to repair.”
“We see slides fairly frequently, but rarely one this size,” an official with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) observes. And, in fact, on his way to the big slide, Chris saw several other, smaller landslides that he’d not heard about. That such slides could happen on “reclaimed” land at all, let alone “frequently,” calls into question the adequacy of reclamation protocols—and presents an opportunity, as Chris and others in Tennessee see it.
“Normally Katuah Earth First! regards politicians as scum who are not to be trusted on any level,” Chris writes in another email to the MJS listserv. “But tactically at this juncture in our campaign here in Tennessee all the arrows are pointing to our state agencies. TDEC regulates water permits for Tennessee. Mountaintop removal aka cross-ridge mining by its very nature destroys highland watersheds. TDEC has been wavering lately on the wisdom of being a rubber stamp for the final solution for our watersheds.” MJS is aiming to compel them to instead protect streams by protecting their mountains.
In mid-March, MJS organizers from around the region once again gather for a weekend meeting, this time in Asheville, at Warren Wilson College just east of town. Close to four dozen people attend, at least a dozen or so newcomers since the meeting in Blacksburg.
Bo tells the meeting that there’s been heavy blasting behind Marsh Fork Elementary School in the past month. In Kentucky, activists affiliated with KFTC (a few of whom attend part of this weekend’s meeting) are looking to see what their role in MJS might be. Erin from Blacksburg reports on plans for a “Listening Project” in and around the town of Appalachia, Virginia, going door-to-door to hear people’s concerns about mining in their neighborhoods. (Last August there, a three-year-old boy, Jeremy Davidson, asleep in his bed, was crushed to death by a boulder off an MTR site above his home.) Listening Projects have also been done or are soon to begin near Zeb Mountain in Tennessee and in Coal River valley. College students from several states are expected soon to visit Larry Gibson’s place at Kayford Mountain, to see MTR firsthand, in the hope of drawing